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Oracle Weekly Roundup: Leaders, Linkers, & Database 12c Likers

My Fourth of July sunburn was worth it—lucky I was wearing my hat—because I came back from the beach with a great list of story links. That’s what we do each Friday, when OracleVoice scours the web to surface bookmark-worthy nuggets.

With OracleOracle Database 12c now in general availability, Forbes.com notes the milestone in “Oracle Database 12c Runs the Cloud,” by Andrew Mendelsohn, senior vice president, Oracle Database Server Technologies. “Oracle Database 12c offers more than 500 new features, including enhancements to help customers exploit emerging opportunities in big data and business analytics,” he writes. “[It] will help simplify the creation of private clouds, allow SaaS vendors to greatly enhance the level of functionality and security offered to customers, and serve as the foundation for Oracle’s extensive set of public cloud services.”

InfoWorld offers positive feedback for Oracle Database 12cbybeta tester Riyaj Shamsudeen, president of consultants OraInternals. He writes that 12cintroduces “important new capabilities in so many areas—database consolidation, query optimization, performance tuning, high availability, partitioning, backup, and recovery.” Shamsudeen’s overall verdict: “Having worked with the beta for many months, I can tell you that the quality of software is impressive.” Read his review here.

Who are the 50 most powerful people in enterprise technology?BusinessInsider has just handed me the envelope with its 2013 list. And the winner is—no surprise—Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “He has crafted his most ambitious plan yet,” writer Julie Bort says in an apparent reference to Oracle’s acceleration of cloud and engineered systems. “It’s hard to doubt the man. He’s been successful at almost everything he’s done, including winning the most prestigious sailing race ever: the America’s Cup.” The other 49 folks on the list? Not Larry. Hey, you’ll get no spoiler alerts from me. Break the suspense, here.

CEOs can’t be social wallflowers anymore. That’s the message I got from Mike Stiles’ insightful post, “8 Tough Social Strategy Questions for Your CEO,” on the Oracle Social Spotlight blog. Addressing managers contemplating their social strategies, Stiles, Oracle senior content manager, wields a sharp but timely stick. “Corporate leaders aren’t being asked to be innovators, pioneers, and risk-takers,” he writes. “That ship has sailed. Now we’re at the point where the continued refusal to adopt a fully accepted modern means of communication makes an organization just look silly. It’s like taking a wait-and-see approach toward this ‘telephone’ thing.”

Oracle Endeca’s enhancement with e-business extensions is in the spotlighton Larry Dignan’s ZDNet blog and at PCWorld. The new extensions enable businesses to explore their operational data in real time, including the ability to surface transactions requiring immediate attention. “We’re trying to replace a lot of operational reporting,” explains Cliff Godwin, senior vice president of Oracle Applications Development. Endeca, acquired by Oracle in 2011, gets to there from here by building on its expertise in unstructured data management, web commerce, and business intelligence. The extensions, Godwin adds, “Deliver a streamlined path from discovery to action, letting users intuitively filter from highly aggregated, highly visual displays of information to the transactions that matter the most.”

And don’t forget the Best of OracleVoice right here on Forbes.com. Healthcare, the permanently trending keyword for us baby boomers, gets intelligently connected to analytics in “Big Data Is Good For Your Health.” Author Sharon Terry, president and CEO of Genetic Alliance, makes the point that it’s people who will power this link. “I find myself becoming increasingly optimistic that we are approaching a tipping point for the consumer movement in health,” she writes. “It is a movement that will enable consumers to be more active participants in their own health, gain more personalized care, and contribute to the acceleration of clinical research and the quest to ameliorate disease.”

If you don’t know what FedRAMP is (or even if you do), don’t miss John Foley’s “The Top 10 Cloud Innovations in Federal Government.” John estimates that the US government is the biggest cloud user in the world. His list details what “the feds have done to overcome challenges and make the cloud a viable and sustainable alternative to old-school IT.” [Answer: FedRAMP stands for the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program.]

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